If anybody was in dire need of a good publicity agent, Mary Mallon was.

She was an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook for affluent New York families in the early
1900s and also the first person identified in America as an “asymptomatic” typhoid carrier.

She became known the world over as Typhoid Mary.

Mallon (who spent the last 23 years of her life in quarantine) could have used someone like Mary
Beth Keane as an image consultant. Keane, a New York author, combined painstaking research and a
fertile imagination to tell the story from Mallon’s point of view.

Fever, a fact-based Keane novel, arrived this month in bookstores.

Q: What sparked your interest in the story of Mary Mallon?

A: My husband was watching a documentary about her, and I got interested enough to read about
her. And a lot of what I read was written by people who couldn’t possibly have understood her point
of view: doctors, lawyers, the educated elite.

Q: Is it true that she left no letters or diaries and that you had nothing to consult in trying
to find her voice?

A: There’s one letter. It’s part of her habeas-corpus file. It’s the only thing I found in her
voice, written in her hand. You can feel her frustration and how angry she was about being
held.

But this, for the fiction writer, made it more appealing. I could get a sense of her personality
without having to stick to the script. I could invent her completely, while feeling that I was
getting it right.

Q: Was she a villain or a victim?

A: I think she was both. I think she was right when she claimed she was targeted for reasons
that had nothing to do with the case.

But I also think she was wrong when, after being released on the condition that she not work as
a cook again, she went back.

Q: Do you see your book, even though it takes place in the early 1900s, as timely?

A: Whenever there’s an issue where we have to decide which is more important — the public health
or an individual’s rights — her story is very timely.

Today, for example, we have debates about whether kids should be vaccinated in school and
whether it should be mandatory.